Code
#pip install contextilyElephants & Study Area
Asian Elephants: Why This Species Matters
Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) are an Endangered species and one of the last remaining large herbivores in Southeast Asia. Over the past century, their populations have declined sharply due to habitat loss, poaching, agricultural expansion, and increasing human–elephant conflict. These conflicts often arise when elephants leave protected forests in search of food, entering plantations or villages. The result is a complex landscape where conservation goals intersect directly with agricultural livelihoods and community safety.
Understanding where elephants prefer to live and how human activities reshape their available habitat is therefore essential for designing conservation strategies, anticipating risk, and reducing conflict.
Study Region
Thailand hosts roughly 4,000 wild elephants, and nearly half live in five major forest regions. Among them, the Eastern Forest Complex (EFCOM) is one of the largest and most ecologically significant. It also experiences some of the highest human–elephant conflict rates in the country, due to expanding plantations, road networks, and scattered settlements around its edges.
The elephants in EFCOM rely on a mosaic of evergreen forest, mixed forest, grassland, and water bodies within protected areas. However, the landscape around these forests is rapidly changing—rubber, palm, and fruit plantations form a patchwork around the protected core, creating narrow ecological corridors and limiting elephant movement.
The map below shows the geographic scope of this project—a section of the Eastern Forest Complex that includes protected forest, agricultural land, villages, water bodies, and transportation infrastructure. This spatial context is important for interpreting both elephant occurrence patterns and model results later in the analysis.
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Study Region Boundary